Security Clearance: COSMIC TOP SECRET

After I saw this video with some retired (Air Force?) military brass talking about “cosmic-level security clearance” I went searching for some validation of this. I turned up on the FAS site and there was a doc there speaking about national security, its history, and its clearances but that doc only speaks about the 3-4 standard sec classes (restricted, classified, secret, top secret; see chapter 3, table 3.1.A.)

After not finding much of anything I decided to back burner the story … until today. After reading “The Man Who Never Was” I was compelled again to plumb the depths of the security classification mystery. What WAS Cosmic? Was what that guy was talking about true?

A quick query of ‘security classification’ brought me a string of pages. The trusty FAS hit near top, it was a good sign. The USG Intelligence Community maintains a webportal and they had a page describing the various levels of classification, only theirs listed even FEWER sec classes. Sitting at my computer terminal I began to wonder “hm, what’s going on here?”

Scrolling down the Google list I stumble across a Wikipedia entry on Security Classifications. “Hmm, benign enough” I think to myself as I click through to the slayer of Britannica’s sec class entry.

Hope is fading, “what that brigadier general or whatever he was said was probably untrue.” I’m disheartened at this possibility but I continue on … suddenly this wicks across my screen under the heading Sharing classified information between countries …

When a government agency or group shares information between an agency or group of other countryâ€™s government they will generally employ a special classification scheme which both parties have previously agreed to honor. For example, sensitive information shared amongst NATO allies has four levels of security classification; from most to least classified, COSMIC TOP SECRET (CTS), FOCAL TOP SECRET (FTS), NATO SECRET (NS), NATO CONFIDENTIAL (NC), and NATO RESTRICTED (NR). A special case exists with regard to NATO UNCLASSIFIED (NU) information. This is NATO property and must not be made public without NATO permission.

I have discovered the Cosmic Top Secret class!! Level up! Mana up! w00t

Further searches turn up nothing as spectacular as the UFO ecstatics make it out to be. Here are the support docs A and B